DD81 – The Wreck of Western Culture
Do I want to be thought of as a ‘grumpy old man’? Well, I am old, and I can be grumpy. However, it is an epithet that implies recalcitrance, stuck in the past, and unable to see what is changing and the importance of rethinking past preconceptions. I should also confess that I remember being impressed by The Wreck of Western Culture when I first read it, back in the early 2000s. It was sweeping, bold, uncompromising, and articulate. Twenty years later a defence of the ‘Western tradition’ seems rather quaint, and to many people rather seriously out of touch. However, I suggest it does deserve another visit.
The author, John Carroll, was a professor of sociology when the book appeared. The first edition was published in 1993, bit it was updated in 2004 with a subtitle added. The key to John Carroll’s book is in that subtitle: Humanism Revisited. According to John Carroll, Western culture has been dead on its feet for more than a century. “By 1900,” he commented, “it is all over.” By “it”, Carroll means a culture free from what he considers to be the devastating blight of humanism. The humanist dilemma had been summed up succinctly by George Orwell in 1945: “As long as supernatural beliefs persist, men can be exploited by cunning priests and oligarchs, and the technical progress which is a prerequisite of a just society cannot be achieved. On the other hand, when men stop worshipping God they promptly start worshipping Man, with disastrous results.” Predicated on the view that Western high culture is in a declining if not nihilistic mode, Carroll’s Humanism traces this decline to an epistemic tyranny of reason and its subjection of all other forms of knowing and understanding what is meant by ‘being’.
A review in The Age back in 2004, on ‘assessing Western culture’s wreck’ suggested The Wreck of Western Culture is concerned with the second part of the problem outlined by Orwell. A long time dying, Western culture was poisoned during the Reformation and Renaissance, which gave rise to self-regarding art and philosophy. The so-called Enlightenment was especially damaging, says Carroll: “The deification of reason leaves much human nature in the dark. The Enlightenment was in fact rather narrow-minded, naive about human motivation, about society and politics, always in danger of barricading itself inside an arid and abstract intellectualism.” He suggests Western culture was finished off by the combined influence of Marx, Darwin and Freud, in whose name human lives were reduced to a set of economic, biological and psychoanalytical factors. In short, ours is a culture obsessed by what is claimed to be the nature of the skull beneath the skin. Carroll castigates Freud for misconceiving the Oedipus complex; it is the antecedent Hamlet complex, he contends, that is the more precise agent of Western cultural ruination.
At one time, John Carroll was one of Australia’s most stimulating thinkers, and together with another thinker of the time, Michel Foucault from far away Europe, he saw a crucial antecedent and warning for the onset of humanism in Velasquez’s Las Meninas(1656). In his analysis, the painting apparently subverts not only the social order in its depiction of the Spanish royal family, but by putting the viewer at the painting’s centre, calls into question the practice of art itself. For Carroll, Velasquez is “the most subtly brilliant harbinger of Western resentment”. However, the approach used by Carroll and Foucault is very different – and indeed ideologically they are antithetical – but they do share an underlying anti-humanism. Carroll acknowledges the advances in the West towards unprecedented levels of physical health and material wellbeing, but mourns the diminution of words such as ‘sacred’, ‘noble’ and ‘honour’. As others have noted, these aren’t terms normally associated with Foucault, who I guess Carroll would consider a nihilist.
In Carroll’s view, in seeking to remake themselves in their own (imperfect) image, the people of the West have lost their soul. The Wreck of Western Culture thus belongs to a negative strand within the Western intellectual tradition. Since the dawn of the Western history of thought, the idea of progress has been accompanied by the idea of decline. Carroll’s guiding light through much of his story is Friedrich Nietzsche, and indeed his style evinces a taste for the apocalyptic and the sublime that is not too distant from the turbulent genius of the German master.
It is Nietzsche who asked: “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions- they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.”
He continues, “We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon everyone. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries’ old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth. From the sense that one is obliged to designate one thing as “red,” another as “cold,” and a third as “mute,” there arises a moral impulse in regard to truth. The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes.”
Nietzsche remains a devastating critic, and John Carroll picks of many of his points (if not his essentially subjective view of the world). Displaying a dazzling eclecticism, Carroll shares with Nietzsche the ability to range across the width and breadth of the cultural landscape . In the Wreck of Western Culture he makes good use of artists’ contributions as much as that coming from philosophers and theologians. There are many examples. Thus the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin can be compared with the Hollywood director John Ford; one chapter in the book convincingly treats a clutch of Ford’s John Wayne westerns as an epic example of modern myth-making. Carroll makes it clear what art he thinks is worthy of attention: “High culture has its own hierarchy, with a few supreme masterpieces at the top. This study concentrates on those masterpieces.” He suggests that in the relatively zombie-like state today, thinkers and artists are generating relatively little worthwhile. After all, it is relatively easy (and cheap?) to suggest modern art is pretty much summed up by Duchamp’s urinal, and Carroll moves on from such an easy target to savage Picasso as a “misogynistic psychopath who made women weep in real life, as well as on the canvas.”
Today there is a vast industry concerned with ‘explaining’ art. Historians show us how imagery became more faithful to what was being seen, through the increasing understanding of perspective, sight lines, reference points and so much more. Others explain what the artist was trying to achieve, how the work related to a commission, a place where it was to be displayed, how it was informed by beliefs, values and hopes. I can still recall my giddy excitement as I read an analysis of The Ambassadors, by Hans Holbein the Younger, in John Carroll’s The Wreck of Western Culture. He used that painting to explore what he argued we have lost through the gradual erosion of the spiritual by the scientific. John Carroll might have been a little didactic (actually, quite a lot), but he did make me think. I had the same experience reading Michel Foucault’s exploration of Velázquez’ Las Meninas in his book The Order of Things. Intellectually fascinating.
His approach was not universally liked at the time and has lost even more support in recent years. However, in 2005 Michael Jensen wrote a review for the Sydney Anglicans journal. He observed, “John Carroll, professor of sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, is not afraid of big ideas. His 2004 book The Wreck of Western Culture, a substantial reworking of a 1993 effort, is a passionate, daring and sustained attack on the bloodlines of what we call “the West.” He calls his book “a spiritual history of the West.” He writes with a refreshing polemical zeal and with none of the hedging and over-qualifying so characteristic of academic prose.
His claim is that “humanism” by which he means the intellectual and cultural movement originating in the Renaissance “has had its deficiencies exposed in the latter-day collapse of western culture. Most particularly, the humanist belief in the supremacy of the human free will as an alternative to obedience to God has been revealed as self-defeating not least by the devastating symbolism of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The strategy Carroll employs for demonstrating his thesis is a selectively genealogical one. In a deliberate snub of postmodern orthodoxy, he examines some of the finest works of high culture in the humanist half-millennium: Hamlet, Holbein’s The Ambassadors, Rembrandt and Poussin, Mozart and Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the novels of Henry James and the films of John Ford. It is an idiosyncratic choice and an unorthodox method, which Carroll justifies because these exceptional masterpieces have “tapped the deepest truths of their time” (p.9). His interaction with these works is stimulating and masterful and makes The Wreck of Western Culture a pleasure to read”, and his comments are thought provoking, at the least.
Jensen continues: “Crucial to the history Carroll traces is the famous sixteenth century debate over the freedom of the human will between the doyen of European humanism, Erasmus of Rotterdam and the German reformer Martin Luther. Carroll bravely reads Luther as more anti-humanist than anti-Roman Catholic. The irenic Erasmus was a reasonable man. If there is no human free will”, he argues, “why should the wicked reform? But Luther’s teaching of justification by faith alone meant a complete rejection of this reliance on human will and reason. For Luther, the human being is a slave to sin and sentenced to death; and must come, empty-handed, to the cross of the crucified Christ. Mere morality was a hopeless absurdity. The heart of the Protestant reformation, rooted in the writings of Paul, is an acknowledgement of the helplessness of the human as a result of sin and death and a need for absolute dependence on God. Humanism, with its alternative diagnosis of the basic goodness of human beings and their freedom to be moral, leads inevitably to the rejection of God. There are some mealy-mouthed versions of Christianity that espouse this kind of thinking, even today: but the calamities of history must be held up against them as evidence. Man has proved a very poor god; ultimately death still undoes him.”
Jensen considers Luther’s insight is as crucial today as it ever was. What Protestant – in other words, Biblical – Christianity offers is a radically different diagnosis of the human condition. The humanist vision has been played out in full and now offers no comfort to the human soul. Carroll offers his work as a contribution to the funeral of humanism, with a warning for us not to give it another run.
But what does he offer as an alternative? Jensen suggests Carroll wants the West to start again, to reach back into the past and recapture that right “enthusiasm for man and his works that the Renaissance attempted to enshrine”. He means by this a simple delight in place of the infatuation with the human that has bought us so badly undone. Carroll writes: “The culture of the West will not be renewed until the moment it kills Luther’s monster [i.e. death], and once again achieves a death of death”. For Carroll, it is in the art of Poussin that a particular alternative is indicated. Though the Frenchman Poussin was a Roman Catholic, Carroll claims that in his pictures he was able to represent Luther’s great ideas. He, too, sees “darkness where the light of neither law nor reason shines” (p.70). He, too, sees the necessity for life and hope to come from outside sources and to be recognised as gifts. Yet he differs from Luther, writes Carroll, in that he appeals to a radically different divinity ‘the sacred breath moving through the mythos’”.
At this point Jensen suggests Carroll loses him somewhat, and “a bit of precise writing on his part might have helped. Suffice to say that he reads the great works of culture as reflective of ‘the body of timeless, archetypal narratives that carry the eternal truths: the big stories on which every culture is founded, ones that are then told and retold to each coming generation’. It is in this mode that he considers theology, art, literature and philosophy: they are the things that a culture needs to survive, what Carroll has called in a previous book our ‘dreaming’”.
An exciting feature of Carroll’s work was his determination to take theology seriously and to read Luther and Calvin as major thinkers in the history of the West (which indeed they are). However, Carroll hangs back from a thoroughgoing endorsement of them, or from charting a clear alternative course for the Western individual. But that is not his intention: this book is ground-clearing rather than ground-breaking. Further, I would have been fascinated to see Western culture compared with Eastern or Islamic cultures. Are these less “wrecked” than ours? Admittedly, Carroll does briefly consider the clash of civilisations through the lens of the 9/11 conflict.
In any event, I read Carroll’s work and The Wreck of Western Cultura as Jensen did: “a full-blown challenge to the decadent culture we inhabit, a culture trying ever harder to assert a basic human goodness but everywhere having to deal with the destructive consequences of our will-to-power”. Now it is twenty years later, and I have to reconsider my enthusiasm. Certainly, humanism is in trouble, but not so much as the challenge from Christianity. Now we seem to have become excessively materialistic and selfish, social cohesion falling apart as modern media allows us to find others like ourselves and any desire to find common ground diminished.
Indeed, today we can see the West is falling apart, and new thinking is coming from very different sources. The values of family, social cohesion and a unified society are promoted by countries like China, but just as we begin to get excited about these ideas, we witness the high levels of compliance and control being exercised in the Peoples Republic. Just as we can see evidence of the ‘wreck’ of western culture on the shoals of dominant capitalism, so Eastern countries are heading into trouble, trying to bludgeon acceptance rather than finding common ground. This year I have been facilitating a discussion group for U3A, first on Truth and now on Belief. Reviewing the past has been fun, but contemplating the mess we are in today is disheartening. If humanism is failing, it seems the only alternative is to live in virtual isolation, sustained by entertaining technologies? Not a good approach? Can you offer any alternatives?
